"WHEN FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA IT WILL BE WRAPPED IN THE FLAG
AND CARRYING A CROSS." -SINCLAIR LEWIS

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Something Someone Else Said

" When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today's right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It's about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet's ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

Meanwhile, the GOP leaders, having done all they can to destroy a presidency by obstructing everything and anything he might do or have done to address the crippling problems bequeathed him by his predecessor, are now also waging a scorched earth battle to prevent the working poor from having any real access to affordable health insurance.

This is what the right now is: no solutions, just anger, paranoia, insecurity and partisan hatred." -Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish.

I find this whole Dave Weigel/Journolist kerfuffle quite disgusting. Yes, he wrote some very rude things that he has admitted he should not have but they were written in private emails (in so much as a list-serv of 400 people can be considered private). The point is that those emails were not written for public consumption and the fact that I'm reading and watching conservative journalists gleefully squealing about how they would be the first ones to sell that list-servs archives means that they are tacitly endorsing the following philosophies: that all emails and other digital correspondence should no longer carry any expectation of privacy, that it's OK to betray the trust of another journalist as long as there's enough money involved in doing so, that journalists can no longer express any type of private opinion on any issue in any forum and that if any evidence of said private opinions becomes public knowledge they should immediately be fired for holding them. No wonder the Fourth Estate has forgotten how to do its job.

2 comments:

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

This Breitbart is perhaps as dangerous as any of these right wing scumbags JBW. He is the champion of stirring up hatred at tea parties. My local "online news source" promotes this joker at every opportunity.


There is no shame. No concern for America as a whole by the right. They stole the phrase "By any means necessary" and ran with it.

JBW said...

I think that might be a bit too much of a blanket accusation, T101. I think a lot of people on the right really do have good intentions and are trying to do what they think is best for America. Now of course I do believe that some of what they want is quite wrong but I also think that it's the nut jobs in the Republican leadership who genuinely have little regard for the good of this country. Now you could argue that the average Repub voter tacitly approves of their tactics by continuing to vote for them and you'd have a point but I don't blame that average voter for not being an activist for change within their own party either. And the leadership on the left definitely does bad things too, it's just that those on the right are so much better at it.